There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

EA-Playfish has just released a new game, and in typical subtle fashion, they are just letting the game spread on its own word of mouth. The game is called My Empire, and it’s an empire-building game that asks the player to manage workers and resources to build up a fantastic sprawling city. The graphical theme seems to be a take on ancient Greece, and all the in-game advisors and characters are dressed in Togas with leaves adorning their hair.

The essence of the game is to have workers collect resources, then use those resources to build buildings that house your people but also increase their happiness. For instance, if you have thousands of people living in your city, but they have nothing to do, they start to complain. All you need to do is build a Greek style bathhouse to satisfy their boredom. The game is certainly reminiscent of games like SimCity, and as you build buildings it’s great to see them animatedly progress as they are being built. If you do jump over to the game, you’ll notice that when you visit your default friend’s city, you can see just how large the cities can evolve to, and it’s a visual feat.

At Social Gaming Summit 2010, Christa Quarles from Playdom discussed that one of the challenges they had with their city-building game, Social City, was that there were so many animations that the game would slow down when looking at big cities, and I was expecting the same thing from My Empire. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case, and it seems as if the game has been built in an extremely steady fashion. I had very few hitches or slowdowns for what looks to be a very complex game. We’ll see if this holds up as my city grows, but the game does look very solid at this point.